The Short List: Fighters who are totally getting screwed out of a title shot

For too long, our writers’ hyper-specific arguments have been confined to the private corridors of the Internet. Welcome to The Short List, where we take their instant message bickerings, add a little polish, and make them public. Today: Fighters who are totally getting screwed out of a title shot.

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1. Cub Swanson, because if anyone deserves a second chance, it’s him

Mike Bohn: A 3-3 run that featured losses to Jose Aldo and Chad Mendes to close out his WEC career hurt Cub Swanson’s title aspirations upon joining the UFC roster. In particular, the eight-second loss at the knees of “Scarface” at WEC 41 is still a major black cloud that hangs above Swanson’s head.

Realistically, though, with five consecutive victories in the UFC (including four knockout finishes), Swanson (20-5 MMA, 5-1 UFC) deserves much better than his scheduled bout against unranked Jeremy Stephens this June. In fact, he deserves a title shot and rematch with Aldo.

Sure, Swanson is getting the UFC main event rub against Stephens – the significance of which cannot be understated – but he should have been granted a title shot instead after a 2013 campaign that saw him deliver stellar performances against ranked opposition in Dennis Siver and Dustin Poirier.

It admittedly would have been a tough sell to put Swanson in the octagon with Aldo for a rematch after the quick and one-sided nature of the first contest. However, Aldo’s next title challenger comes in the form of Mendes, who has also been knocked out by one of the champion’s lethal knees, and much more recently at that.

Several fighters who surround Swanson in the rankings have gotten their shots at Aldo. The 30-year-old has evolved more than any of them since the original meeting, and if anyone at 145-pounds deserved a second chance at dethroning the longtime titleholder, it should have been the Jackson-Winekeljohn MMA product.

2. Vitor Belfort, because it’s not his fault the rules changed

Steven Marrocco: This thought will be popular, I’m sure.

I cringed with every head kick that knocked someone to Ipanema after we found out Vitor Belfort was on Big-T. Every time another one fell to “The Phenom,” I wondered, what happens if someone gets seriously hurt, or worse yet, dies? How will it look to the world if the fighter who hurt the other fighter was on a sanctioned regimen of legal steroids? In other words, pretty much the same questions I had since TRT first crossed our collective radar with Chael Sonnen.

It certainly didn’t help that the UFC wasn’t exactly transparent about the subject, and Vitor obfuscated the truth when asked about it prior to his fight with Michael Bisping. So when the NSAC and UFC closed the door on TRT, I wasn’t too broken up about it.

Now, with all that being said, Belfort never broke any rules when it came to doctor-prescribed T. He may or may not have jacked himself up for his first fight with Anderson Silva, and in subsequent fights, but the fact of the matter is he passed the test, and then passed tests for his subsequent fights. Not the most sophisticated things out there, those dime-store urine screens, but nonetheless, he didn’t officially break any rules.

Everyone knew he was on testosterone on Feb. 7, including the Nevada State Athletic Commission, which decided to test him at “random” when he showed up to the World MMA Awards in Las Vegas. It’s not a stretch that he would fail that test, because he had no reason not to be on TRT. The test results came in just after the commission decided to ban the stuff, and wouldn’t you know it, the commission failed to get a disclosure form that would have made Belfort’s fate public.

I’m not trying to get too tinfoil hat here, but it does seem as though Belfort was set up to fail. And like a lot of people out there, I don’t necessarily mind that fact. Banning a treatment that could very easily be abused and lead to a disaster is a small price to pay for denying Belfort the ability to fight within normal levels of testosterone which, mind you, might have been thrown out of whack in the first place by previous steroid use (see: PRIDE 32). But the way things have turned out, he’s kind of getting screwed out of a title shot. He was scheduled to fight middleweight champ Chris Weidman at Saturday’s UFC 173. As soon as TRT was banned, he got yanked from the golden opportunity. And now, there’s no telling if he’s going to get it back.

In all likelihood, Belfort is just a casualty of the politically untenable practice of allowing fighters with questionably weak testosterone the right to thumb their nose at mother nature and then punch opponents in the face. The young dinosaur will find a way to fight without TRT, or perhaps find another fountain of youth. But he earned his title shot, and he isn’t getting it. And it may not entirely be his fault that that’s the case.

3. Ben Askren, because you don’t have to like what he does – you just have to stop it

Ben Fowlkes: Right off I’ll say that I don’t particularly enjoy watching Ben Askren fight. He wrestles people to the floor, holds them there like a big brother who knows that mom won’t be home for hours, and annoys them all the way to the breaking point with his largely ineffectual ground-and-pound. He also does this to just about everybody, and so far, over the course of 12 professional fights, no one has been able to stop him.

Does that mean he should have gotten a UFC contract along with an immediate title shot once he left Bellator as a free agent? Yeah, I think so. Why not? The UFC was prepared to put Bellator lightweight Eddie Alvarez into a title fight right away, or at least it would have if he could have gotten free of his Bellator contract. Alvarez wasn’t even a Bellator champ at the time, and he’d recently suffered a submission loss. Askren has the pedigree and the perfect record, so why was the UFC so uninterested in signing him, much less giving him a crack at the belt?

Come on. You know why.

I’m not saying that, as a “real fight fan,” you are obliged to enjoy seeing Askren do his thing. I’m just saying that, seeing as how this whole sport started with the notion of pitting one style against another in order to find out who was the best martial artist, shouldn’t he still get a chance to make his case?

Thing is, if the UFC handled it right, it’d be a win-win. Askren takes the title? He’s the sneering jock heel who doesn’t care what you ignorant fans think, and doesn’t lie about it. Get Chael Sonnen to help him turn up the volume on his existing sneering jock heelness (which is ample), and people would buy pay-per-views just hoping to see him get his face beat in. And if Askren loses that title fight? The UFC gets to say that Bellator’s best just wasn’t up to the challenge in the big leagues.

But no. Instead he has to go fight in Singapore. He doesn’t even get a chance in the UFC. The cruel irony is, if he were actually from Singapore he might have gotten signed just to fill out one of those overseas Fight Pass cards. Ain’t that something? Somebody get Alanis Morissette on the phone. She’s going to love this one.

ALBANY, N.Y. – MMAjunkie is on scene and reporting live from today’s UFC Fight Night 102 event at Times Union Center in Albany, N.Y., which kicks off at 5:45 p.m. ET (2:45 p.m. PT). You can discuss the event here.

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